She's Not There by Jennifer Finney Boylan

lie since I had a face that apparently betrayed every secret about me except one.
    So now I had a secret in my academic life, a secret in my personal, sexual life, and my father was dying. Still, we had a pretty good time. Glenn Blake and I used to go to this little bar and drink Anchor Steam Beer and eat Mrs. Irvin’s Red Hot Potato Chips. They really were hot, too. Glenn would say Texas things like “Well, god
damn
!” and sometimes he’d say, “Well, goddamn!” and once in a while he said, “
Well!
Goddamn!” He had all kinds of Galvestonian slang. One time he said to me, “Boylan, you’re slipperier than owl shit on a sycamore branch.” Another time he described the work of one of my fellow workshoppers as “farts in the bathtub,” which wasn’t exactly a compliment.
    I spent less and less time at school as my father got sicker. In mid-March I withdrew from Hopkins, unsure if I was ever going back. John Irwin was unbelievably generous to me. “You take care of your family,” he said. “We’ll sort out everything else later.”
    My father died on Easter Sunday 1986. When he died, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was on the radio. After he died I sat next to him for a long time, just holding his hand.
I’m going to make you
proud, Dad
, I told him.
You wait and see.
I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to do this, but I intended to keep my word.
    I started therapy again. This time I saw a gender specialist who lived down near Fell’s Point. She was a smart, vigorous, hugely fat woman named Carol. I’d turn into a woman and drive down to the Point in my Volkswagen, and we’d talk. At the end of that year, she said to me, “Well, listen. You’re a transsexual. The condition isn’t going to go away over time. It’s going to get worse. What you need to do is learn to conquer your fear. If you choose, you can live a perfectly normal life as a woman. You’re lucky—you have feminine features, you have good hair, you’re not married, and you’re young. You have a lot going for you, if only you find the courage to move ahead with your life.”
    That was the last time I saw Carol. I didn’t want to be told I had to be a woman. What I wanted from her was
the mystery to a solution.
    I wanted to learn how to accept who I wasn’t.
    What I felt was, being a man might be the second best life I can live, but the
best
life I can live will mean only loss and grief. So what I wanted was to learn how to be happy with this second best life. My mother’s boundless optimism still buoyed me. In spite of my father’s death, in spite of spending a year in Tombstone, in spite of the constant, private grief that I felt, I still believed that it was a life full of blessings. People can’t have everything they want, I thought. It is your fate to accept a life being someone other than yourself.
    I don’t think this is so crazy, even now. If I could have pulled this off, I would have.
    In March I ran into Grace Finney again at a party in Boston, up at Moynihan’s house. We traded numbers again, and this time I did connect with her. We went out on a few dates, sometimes in Washington, sometimes in Baltimore. We didn’t see the Orioles, though.
    One hot spring night, Grace Finney and I went out to dinner at a place called Niçoise, in Washington. It was upscale French cuisine, served by waiters in black tuxes and roller skates.
    Grace was that rarest of creatures, the native-born Washingtonian. Her father,Tom Finney, had been true Democratic Party royalty. He’d come east from Oklahoma in the 1950s to work for Senator Mike Monroney, then he’d worked on the Adlai Stevenson campaign; he was one of the key players who helped draft the compromise that seated the Mississippi delegation at the national convention in 1956. Later, he advised JFK on trade legislation and went into private law